Brexit discussion thread V - No Pic/GIF dumps please

RobMc59 wrote: »

I`ve also seen posts bizarrely suggesting the UK should pay for this to soften the loss of NHS and other benefits which would no longer be available to former NI residents. That is unlikely to happen.

Considering that Irish public health expenditure is actually signficantly higher than the UK on a €/capita basis and when you add in private spending too it's a lot higher, I don't see why there would be any need. The issues with the HSE and healthcare in the Republic of Ireland are entirely organisational and due to the legacy of not having created a single-tier system.

Effectively, the HSE is what the UK system would have looked like if it hadn't been transformed into the NHS by the Beveridge Report and quite socialist policies under Labour. It's one of the few remaining solidly socialist planks of UK public policy. We continued on with the mix of charitable hospitals, bits of state funding and added voluntary health insurance and have increasingly just pumped more and more public money into the same, largely unaltered, structure. That's why it's full of issues. It morphed into a very heavily publicly funded system, but without structural changes.

Based on what we spend, we should have a healthcare system that's as good as Sweden and a lot better than the UK! It's a topic for another thread, but we really get poor value for money.

Assuming the NI NHS works and would continue to work as-is, it would actually represent a significant cost saving per capita vs rolling out the Republic's chaotic two-tier system.

If anything, we could substantially reduce Irish healthcare costs by just duplicating the NI model in the Republic. The NHS model is just a hell of a lot more efficient at getting bang-for-buck. There's no question about that.

So, financially speaking, NI would actually potentially see MORE money available for the NHS within the Republic's current spend model anyway.

I don't want to derail the thread, but there's an assumption that under a united Ireland that the North would just de facto be switched over to the same systems as the Republic, I would assume the more likely scenario would be a federal setup and the best of both being adopted in both jurisdictions. Some things are done better in the Republic some things are done better in the North. If you combine the two approaches, taking the best of each system, there would be no reductions in service. They might improve in both jurisdictions.

For example: in a UI, the North would automatically benefit from the Republic's FAR more aggressive FDI and business-friendly policies, which would hopefully drive the Northern economy in a way that UK domestic policy hasn't to-date. You'd also have much more appropriate economic and fiscal policies tuned to NI needs, not just generic UK approaches.

Done right, the Northern economy would be transformed and the Republic would benefit from being dragged into reorganising its health services.

The assumption that the north is some kind of dead-weight economic burden does not have to be the case. It would go from being an obscure backwater in the UK to being a major part of Ireland with huge policy priority.

You also get greater economies of scale and all of those things with a country that would be 6.65 million (ROI: 4.784 + NI: 1.875) and probably likely to grow to 10+ million over the coming decades.

But, alas, Northern Ireland politics is still stuck somewhere around 1921. I don't see much more than a crash-out happening now tbh.